Gitpod comes to your city - host a community meet-up

Pauline Narvas DevRel + Community at Gitpod

Feb 6, 2023

Last Monday, we hosted our first ever in-person community meet-up in Paris, France. Our passionate French community and Heroes helped guide our decision on choosing France as our kick-off location. It seemed like a fitting initial location to bring us all together. 🫶

The Heroes program recognises developers that go above and beyond to contribute to Gitpod. By being part of the program you get exclusive perks and benefits. For example, Gitpod community heroes get to preview upcoming features and are involved in discussions with Gitpod engineers and product managers.

We want to empower Heroes to create opportunities with Gitpod for them to succeed! For instance, recently, Heroes Palani and Henit have been building a Raycast extension using the upcoming Gitpod public API with support from IDE product manager, Lou and DevRel Engineer, Siddhant. We’ve also brought Heroes on our virtual community stage during our Office Hours and reviewed content by Heroes.

For the last two years, the Gitpod Community has mostly existed in the digital world. Although distributed across different platforms, we wanted to explore fostering real life connections.

Our Hero, Jean-Phi Baconnais who is a serial conference speaker and events organizer was super enthusiastic about hosting our first meet-up. When I approached him with the idea in December, we already had the ball rolling from that first chat and in just a few weeks, the event was live and happening in Zenika’s Paris office. 🇫🇷

Talk about Shipping Skateboards! 🛹

Lightning talks are the core of the meetup ✨

The evening was structured with four lightning talks from myself, Jean-Phil, Oliver and Horacio. All the talks except mine were in French, where our Heroes shared their use cases and demos of using Gitpod. At future local meetups, we also want to explore discussion rounds and Gitpod hackathons. If you have an idea, let me know on Discord or Twitter.

You can catch up with the talks from our Paris meetup below!

Connecting with our community around the world 🌎

The topic of connection is both a personal and professional goal of mine - connecting with myself and others - and so, this opportunity with our community, users and Heroes excited me! There are many learnings from this meet-up that we’re looking forward to applying to future community events.

Thank you to attendees and speakers for the energy and love for Gitpod, we’re so excited to continue supporting and collaborating with you all. 🧡

Host a Gitpod meetup in your city 🌃

Are you interested in hosting a local Gitpod meet-up in your city?

They are an opportunity to connect with others in the community and learn and share the best Gitpod practices and knowledge. It is also a way to bring our primarily virtual Gitpod community to life! 😊

The Gitpod Community Team is here to help you be as successful as you can be with your local group! These are the ways we can help:

1. Spreading the word: We will also help spread the word to users in your area and share it on our official communications channels
2. Offering swag for attendees
3. A budget for food and beverages
4. Depending on location, we could also have a Gitpodder in your area attend to give a talk or support in person
5. Creating a channel on our Discord server for you to chat with attendees and organizers

Ready to go? Follow our guidelines and let us know in the #contribute channel on Discord. Hopefully see you in the next event! 👋